Brian Evenson Quotes

#1. Of course there's another choice, he thought. There is always another choice. I'm just not going to take it.

Brian Evenson

#2. When I say I'm instinctive [in writing], I do feel like I need to hide what I'm doing from myself. My mind just needs to be able to operate untrammeled.

Brian Evenson

#3. In Kamby Bolongo Mean River damage and delusion walk hand in hand, and everything we think we know is gradually called into question. Reading like a cross between Samuel Beckett's 'The Calmative' and Gordon Lish's Dear Mr. Capote, Robert Lopez's new novel gets under your skin and latches on.

Brian Evenson

#4. Still," said Ramse. "You're not much. You're what you are and we love you for it, but you're not much.

Brian Evenson

#5. Truth cannot be imparted," said Kline. "It must be inflicted.

Brian Evenson

#6. I get a feeling, on a guitar, and I sort of mess around until something resonates with me, and then I just find that what happens is that a melody comes, and with that, words.

Beth Orton

#7. That's Kline," he said. "We know and love him. He's like a person to us.

Brian Evenson

#8. I came into reality television with MTV's show 'The Real World,' specifically the 1994 season set in San Francisco. I was glued to the Puck and Pedro drama.

Molly O'Keefe

#9. In the years since I worked with John Hughes, there were many years where I literally had hundred of doors slammed in my face because I wasn't that kid anymore, and I wasn't a character actor, and I wasn't a leading man, and I wasn't whatever Hollywood was looking for.

Anthony Michael Hall

#10. People clustered in twos or threes or fours, I have come to believe, both constitute creatures in and of themselves and, together as tandems or triunes or packs, form another sort of myriad-minded creature whose actions are far from predictable.

Brian Evenson

#11. Anything can happen: anything. Or nothing. Who can say? The world, monstrous, is made that way, and in the end consumes us all. Who am I, administrated or no, to have the audacity to survive it?

Brian Evenson

#12. I think being different, going against the grain of society is the greatest thing in the world.

Elijah Wood

#13. There has, I fear, developed the worst of needs, the need to know, coupled reluctantly with an awareness that I probably will, in fact, never know.

Brian Evenson

#14. As long as you are following God's will, friend Kline. But even God sometimes becomes impatient. You know the story of Jonah, friend Kline? How many whales do you suppose God will deign send to swallow you? When does God run out of whales?

Brian Evenson

#15. But what then am I? A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts, understand, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, and that also imagines and senses.

Rene Descartes

#16. Just remember it's the birds that's supposed to suffer, not the hunter.

George W. Bush

#17. I read individual stories a lot in magazines and other places, too, but I really think there's something to be said for reading story collections as collections. That's not true of all story collections, to be honest, but for good ones I think it often is true.

Brian Evenson

#18. His only mistake was not realizing there was a second car. There's always a second car. Except when there's not.

Brian Evenson

#19. I'm pretty instinctual when I write, and I really like to get to a point where I'm writing where I don't know what's going to happen next. Usually when I get to that point, something will happen that I find intriguing or interesting, or that will push the fiction in a way that I really like.

Brian Evenson

#20. What was the truth? he wondered. How important was it to know? And once he knew, what then?

Brian Evenson

#21. I can't say the advertising model is obsolete yet but it doesn't make a lot of sense in the long range.

Jay Chiat

#22. Curiosity is a terrible thing, he was thinking. How is it possible to stop oneself from needing to know?

Brian Evenson

#23. Help people help themselves. Don't judge, just help. In this process, be cautious to simply point them in the right direction and help them get moving. Don't make your journey theirs, nor make their journey yours.

Steve Maraboli

#24. There is, in every event, whether lived or told, always a hole or a gap, often more than one. If we allow ourselves to get caught in it, we find it opening onto a void that, once we have slipped into it, we can never escape.

Brian Evenson

#25. Many people, not just Asians, are more concerned with hustling and getting to meetings with contacts to gain success.

Steven Yeun

#26. With every disaster, I have come to believe for my own personal reasons, comes a compensation, a certain balancing of the accounts - not spread evenly about but clumped here and there, of benefit to very few.

Brian Evenson

#27. I do not say these things for a dollar, or to fill up the time while I wait for a boat;

Walt Whitman

#28. Ideas for stories come in really different terms and really different ways for me. Sometimes they're from books, sometimes they're just kind of out of the air, from nowhere, sometimes they're biographical, or sometimes they're other things [everyday life].

Brian Evenson

#29. Misreading is a big part of reading, the way in which the level of attention you're paying can lead to some interesting residue.

Brian Evenson

#30. One pets what one degrades; and one has to support what one has enfeebled

Phyllis Bottome

#31. But if there's one sure way not to forget something it's to say Forget That.

Niall Williams

#32. I now have Youth Olympic, Olympic and European Games titles, which is a dream. I didn't fight that well and just scraped through a lot of the fights, but winning is a relief, and it's more points towards the Rio Olympics, which takes a bit of pressure off me.

Jade Jones

#33. I am a writer. The proof of how I am feeling is always in my pen.

Helen Humphreys

#34. Truth cannot be imparted. [] It must be inflicted.

Brian Evenson

#35. We do this job because every once in a while someone is out there without hope, desperately praying for their life, and we get to be the answer.

U.S. Coast Guard

#36. One of the primary differences for me between fiction and poetry is that fiction uses every sort of tool that poetry does but hides it much, much more. Fiction doesn't necessarily reveal what it's doing with rhythm and sound and patterning.

Brian Evenson

#37. I am your friend," Gous said. "I drank with you, didn't I?"
Kline tried to nod but nothing happened. He could see the wrappings around Gous' hand staining with blood.
"Besides," said Gous, "friendship is one thing, God another.

Brian Evenson